How I Went From Broke to $20M+ (i sent this video to all my employees)

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm actually showing you kind of behind the scenes of a video that I made for employees of a guestination. So this is for employees that mow grass all the way to office workers, to owners. And this is really about personal finance. And some of this is going to seem really basic, but a couple things I want. My goals and objectives of this video is, number one, hopefully inspire you to start talking to your employees about personal finances, them getting ahead in their career and just trying to build them up instead of just thinking about your own business ideas. I truly believe in the long term, that's gonna help you if that's, you know, if you really wanna make more money. I actually think in the long term this will have more committed employees and people that are on your team. But I also believe that doing this will create a culture that people want to come work for you and you'll attract better talent. And so this is a long video. I wasn't necessarily planning to share this publicly. It's not made for the public viewers. So some of the stuff in here is really specific for Augusta, for employees of Augusta Lawn Care. Obviously, if you wanna share employees, this is probably really good information for them to hear, but hopefully, at least inspire you to do a meeting like this of your own for your team and for your staff. So without any further delay, a little bit behind the scenes, there's one part I didn't cut at the beginning because I just. I did a tour of the command center so that all of Augusta Nation, all the Frontline team members, could actually see all the staff and different offices and things like that. So I cut that part out, jumped right in the meat about personal finance, investing, looking at retirement, career prospects, getting ahead. Hope it's helpful. Enjoy. Hello, Augusta Nation. My name is Mike Andes, and today we're going to talk about personal finances. And this is usually not something I've done in the past that is actually make videos for the Frontline team members. And most of you have never talked to me, maybe watch some of the videos and things. But as part of Augusta Nation, I really do care about everyone and their personal finances. And I want to kind of make a video today, really just for Frontline employees, not necessarily the owners of the businesses. And you can get ahead in life. Life, you can make more money. And the reason I think this is important, you know, if people want to, like, make money a taboo subject or not talk about it, I think it's pretty unwise. I feel like right now we're going to a recession. I've been talking about it for the past eight months or so, and we're kind of starting to see the economy really start to break apart. Lots of layoffs and things like that. So I think it's more important than ever to be educated financially, know what's going on, know how to save, know how to invest, know how to cut expenses and build your wealth. And so whether you are pushing a lawnmower right now, whether you're in the office, whether you're just getting started and doing some landscaping jobs, I think having this type of education is invaluable. And whether or not you stay with Augusta is really irrelevant in my mind. It's a matter of getting ahead to the next stage of your career. And if that's staying with Augusta, great. That's awesome. But at this point, this video today, I really have no intention of trying to convince you of that. It's a matter of you personally making the right decisions for your own personal success and financial freedom. And so I wanted to talk about the things that I wish I would have known in my first job when it comes to money and it comes to getting ahead and becoming rich, which, if you think that's bad thing, hopefully this will kind of change your mind. My goal ultimately, as the founder of Augusta Lawn Care, is to make as many millionaires as possible as the franchisees of Augusta Lawn Care. But I'm also very.

Aware that the employees who actually make it all possible. It's important to me that when someone looks back at working at Augusta Lawn Care in the future, or they're still working at Augusta down the road, they look back and they can say that their own personal success and finances and the finances of their family were improved and that they were educated in a manner that they took certain skills and education, and whenever they moved to a different job down the road, that they took those skills and made more money because of it. They were able to help their family, their community, their church, the causes that they believed in. And that's extremely important to me. And so whether or not you want to own a business or become an owner, Augusta Lawn Care is really irrelevant. And so, like I said, I'm going to try to make this video today, hopefully in under an hour, and like I said, share what I wish I would have got at my very first job, because I didn't. My family didn't talk about money. We didn't ever. Money was a taboo subject. And because of that, we struggled all the time. My family went bankrupt in the last recession and we lost everything, we lost our house, we lost everything. And so I remember the pain of that. I remember that during that time, like, my family is awesome, I love my mom and my dad, but that was the one time I saw them argue is about money. There was never times in my childhood that money or sorry, other things became issues in terms of their relationship and things like that. They're still married today, but the one time I saw it, there was tension inside of the family and inside of the relationship was around money. And so that's probably somewhat inbred inside of me. This desire to make sure that that's never an issue for myself and probably skewed me in the opposite extreme. However, when you look at what causes relationship breakups, like people who say money doesn't matter, I point them to the statistics of, well, the second leading cause of divorce is money after infidelity. And so if you're gonna say, well, I'm just caring about my family, well, then you should make sure you take care of your money. And then for people that are religious and they say, oh, well, you know, money is the root of all evil, then I want you to tell me how you're gonna provide for your family. Because there's also other scriptures that you could talk about that if you don't provide for family, you're worse than infidel. The Bible says so. All the excuses that people make up in my mind are simply smoke and mirrors of their insecurity to actually learn and educate themselves and learn things that they don't know. And I've been there, my family has been there. And I don't want you to be part of that group. I don't want to be you to be a part of the group that because of money, relationships break up. Because of money, you feel like a failure. Because of money, you feel insecure. And I hope that in some small part of this video at least gets you started on the journey to educating yourself, learning about how to make yourself financially free and not depending on any other person. When it comes to money, it's the absolute most confidence building thing. The way to build self confidence the most, in my opinion, is to be financially free. It solves a lot of other problems. And whoever in the world wants to say that money doesn't make you happy. Most of those people don't have money. And most of them deploy money in a manner to the rich people that they're talking about. They deployed money against the things that are incorrect and wrong. But I truly believe that someone who has money has options to be able to put their kids through school, be able to avoid the confrontations and the strife that happens around money and their relationships. And they're able to give the causes they believe in, nonprofits, people that are in need, family and friends that need money. You can actually give to it and not feel helpless, not feel at the whim of a politician, not feel at the whim of a bank to determine your financial freedom and what you do in life. Money brings you options and it brings you freedom. It doesn't bring you happiness. I've never subscribed to that, but it does absolutely bring you options. And those options can bring fulfillment. They can bring you happiness. And in my opinion, I'd rather be rich. That's just the bottom line. And I've been poor and I've been rich and I like being rich more. And so I truly believe that for everyone watching this, working hard, getting ahead in life, spending the next 10, 15, 20 years getting to that place is worth it. And that when you get there, you're not going to spend money the way that people about in newspapers or, you know, in tabloids about people that spend their money incorrectly and they go do stupid stuff with it, they do stuff that's illegal or whatever. I don't feel like most of the people watching this video are going to do that. You're going to be hard working people that want to be able to get ahead in life. And your most that money is going to go back into your family, your community, creating more jobs and at least providing for your family and getting your kids ahead and making sure that they're set for life. And so that's why I make videos like this. And I'm pretty passionate about that. So my story, for those of you don't know, like I said, my family was never wealthy. My dad's a minister. He has been for a long, long time. And so we moved around a whole lot when I was younger. We moved like 20, 22 times when I was still in the house. I think my fan, my parents have moved like 28 or 29 times in their marriage. And that was because my dad's work. And so we travel from different churches and different states and we're all over the place. Kind of settled down in Washington state when I was 11 years old. We started mowing grass with my brother. It was called Andy's Lawn Care, which is my last name. And we saved up for college because we kind of looked at college as our way out of this whole Financial issue. And so quintessential, I want to become a doctor. More specifically, I want to become a surgeon. And honestly, a lot of that was because I was passionate about health and fitness and nutrition, but also because I knew they made a lot of money. And that was again, my way out was like, okay, I'm going to go get education at college. And now looking back at it, I think that was pretty stupid idea. The fact that thinking that I would go get a piece of paper was going to somehow going to set me up for financial freedom when it doesn't, which we'll explain on here in just a little bit. But that was my thought process and that was my brother's thought process to go get educated at college. Because my family had never been, my parents and grandparents had never been to college, and finances had always been an issue. But that was going to be like our way out. That was going to be our way to get ahead in life and kind of break that generational poverty that we, you know, gone through. And don't get me wrong, we weren't like poor, living on, on the streets, but we always knew that money was a problem. We always knew that the next paycheck, the next thing, like we couldn't go get food sometimes because we need more money. Like, there was, it was always there. And like I said, there was. That was the point of contention in the relationships. So.

Yeah, that's basically the premise of why I'm making the video today. I know you maybe haven't had anyone else talk to you this way, and that's why I want to make this video. Unfortunately, education system that we have currently doesn't set people up to make money. It sets them up to get a degree which does absolutely nothing in terms of their career. And so hopefully, again, these are the things that I wish I would have known and been taught in my first job. So whether you're just getting started or maybe you're 40 or 50 and you still don't know some of the things we're going to talk about today. I hope it helps you just get to the next stage, at least make you curious, start learning more, get some books about finances, budgeting, all these things are super important, super valuable. And I hope this brings, you know, whets your appetite a little bit. So I'm just going to go through bullet points. I literally have a whole bunch of notes that I wrote down on the weekend and I just want to go over them. So it's not like the most organized, but it's just my Thoughts to you as they came to me in my brain. So first thing is, I want to explain what the difference between an appreciating asset is and a depreciating asset. Okay, here I check out, we're 10 minutes in. It's way too much. Don't worry. All right, so an appreciating asset goes up in value, okay? And when you, when you're trying to build wealth, you want to try to invest as much as you possibly can in assets that go up in value. Now there's other assets that you can buy, but they're depreciating. And every single asset you have is either a depreciation or. Sorry, every single thing that you buy is either depreciating, going down in value or it's appreciating and going up in value. And you want to build long term wealth, you want to invest as much of your income into things that go up in value. All right? Now over the long term, they go up in value because sometimes things go down. Real estate goes up and down, stocks go up and down. But in general, if you look at the past 10 decades, real estate stocks, they typically go up in value. Now I can guarantee you, if you buy a sandwich at Subway today and you pay $8, but in two weeks the value of that sandwich will be zero. They'll probably negative, kill, smell bad, it'll be rotten, no one will want it. So everything that you buy, you know, clothing, right, you know, you buy some great clothes buying guarantee you in 10 years when they're ripped up, faded, they're going to be worth less. So over the course of those 10 years, that asset that you purchase goes down in value. There therefore is the depreciating asset. Every single purchase your car, you buy a car 10 years from now, unless it's a collector's item, has some sort of antique value, which is a very small percentage of vehicles. For the vast majority of us though, when you buy a car 10 years from now, it will be worth less. Therefore, is it an appreciating asset? Now what's an appreciating asset? Things that go up in value over time, on average, when you look at the stock market, when you look at real estate, these are things that on average go up in value. Now I'm not talking about like get rich fast things. If you're thinking about NFTs or cryptocurrencies and the next meme stock or meme token, that's not what I'm talking about. There is no track record over the course of decades to prove that it is an appreciating asset. It is strictly gambling, and therefore it is a depreciating asset. It goes down in value on average. All right, So I want to explain that first. Depreciating asset. Appreciating asset. Going down in value. Depreciating, Appreciating. It goes up in value. I want to spend as much of my money, much of my income on things that go up in value. That is how you build wealth in America, okay? It really works anywhere, but in general, try to spend much of your money on those things. This is why I'm a big fan of people buying a house, because it forces you to spend money on something that goes up in value instead of spending on rent, which, guess what? If I spend $800 this month on rent, it's a depreciating asset. It's a depreciating. I have one month that, over the course of that one month, I lose $800 because the depreciation of the $800 lasts exactly 31 days or however long that month is. So that is a form of depreciation. I'm buying the asset of one month's living, but it goes down in value where, if I can spend that same $800 or even $1,000 on a mortgage over the course of time, goes up in value. I've now just switched my living expenses, my housing costs, from going from an appreciating asset to an appreciating asset, going from that goes down in value over the next 30 days to something that potentially, on average, is going to go up in value over time, which is going to be your real estate. Okay? So typically, that's the way I explain someone renting versus buying. It forces you to spend your housing allowance, your housing budget, on something that goes up in value. And that might mean Instead of paying $800, you're kind of having to force to pay like 11 or $1,200 for a comparable amount of mortgage to buy that house. But again, I'd rather you spend that 1200 on something that's going up in value. I'm not going to get into all the cost about insurance or interest and all the other taxes associated with home ownership. Those things do bring down that equation. But in general, the very, very generic question I want you to ask every single time you buy something is, is this an appreciating asset? Does it go up in value? Or is this an appreciating asset? Does it go down in value? Like every single thing you Buy this pen has a depreciation is a depreciating asset. Because guess what? When this ink runs out, I'm going to throw it away. So it's depreciating. You know, I already broke the clip on the end of it, so it's worth probably half as much now. I probably paid a dollar. It's probably worth 50 cents now. And in a couple of years, they'll be worth nothing. Right? This phone, this iPhone, I bought it. Probably worth eleven hundred dollars now. Probably worth five hundred in five years. Probably worth fifty bucks, right? So that's a depreciating asset. Now you can use depreciating assets as tools to make more income and start a business. That's what a business is. You take depreciating assets like phones and trucks and computers, things that go down in value, and you produce more income. That's what a business is. But that's aside from the fact that when you look at depreciating assets versus appreciated assets, ask yourself, every single transaction, which is which. Buying food is a depreciating asset. You have to have it. Not all depreciation assets are evil. You have to have food, you have to pay your utility bills. But at the end of the day, they have a very short span at which they very quickly de escalate and very quickly depreciate and go down in value. Okay, all right. In that same token, I want you to know that you are your greatest asset. You say, well, that's a very nice, warm, fuzzy feeling. No, from a number standpoint, when you look at your income that you're going to produce over your lifetime, you are your greatest asset. You will go up in value, whether it be from raises, the skills that you have. And so investing in yourself as an asset is the number one thing you should be doing. And some people are going to say, you know, Ari, have turned me off because, like, I don't have money to invest, I'm not going to become rich. You've already triggered me and I'm out. If you stayed this far, realize that you are your greatest asset. And you are going to be have the highest ROI return on investment of any asset class you'll ever buy. Because if you can improve your skills and make more income because of those skills, you'll be able to outperform any other real estate deal or crypto deal or whatever investment you want to get involved in. If you just improve the asset of yourself because you bring income, you are an asset that brings income and therefore appreciates in time. In 20 years, you'll probably be making more money than you are today. Therefore, you are an appreciating asset. And what I get boggled by is that people spend all their time, money, energy and life focusing on buying depreciating assets like clothes and the next car and next iPhone, and they don't focus on investing their time, energy and money on themselves. And they are their greatest asset. And I don't mean putting on makeup or trying to make yourself liposuction, spending money on that way. I mean, how do I improve my skills, my abilities to where I am more valuable to the marketplace and can make more money? And that does not necessarily mean asking for a raise. That means getting skills. That is investing into yourself. So you have earning potential and you're more valuable to an employer. You're more valuable to the marketplace. And regardless of that employer go gets, does some stupid and gets wiped out in a recession, you'll have the skills because you invested in something that goes up in value and that is yourself. And that's why I'm a big believer in the audible programs, listening to audiobooks, reading books, educating yourself, getting little online courses. Whatever it is to improve your skills is because you are the number one asset you have. Everyone here, you might say I'm poor as I'll get out if you have. If you're watching this, you are an asset you can invest in. You can invest in that. I don't care if you don't have any real estate, you don't have any stocks, you don't have any money in your savings account. If you are watching this, you are your greatest asset and you need to focus on that first. How do you improve that asset? How do you invest time and energy into making that asset perform better? That's what you should be focused on. Now.

64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. All right? And then we wonder why there is anxiety, depression, people get mad at each other, people freak out. There's all sorts of issues. Mental health in our country when, when 64, 64% of Americans literally don't know that if, you know, if they lost their job this week, there would be no food to eat. Like, that's stressful. So for everyone that wants to say money doesn't matter and it's not a big deal and just live life and be happy, don't worry about money.

I want you to step into the shoes of those 64% and realize that they lost their job tomorrow. They have put a 100% of their freedom in the hands of an employer or the hands of a politician that will give them money on unemployment. When those things are gone, they become very vulnerable and that will lead to a lot of fear. That's what leads to a lot of issues, I believe in relationships, families, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Health concerns like, you can't sleep because you people like, well, no, I gained all this weight and you know, I just don't like my, the image of myself. So I'm going to spend money on, you know, you know, makeup or I'm going to, you know, try to get this surgery done or whatever. It's like a great, great to make you feel better. All right. But that's a short term.

Cover for what the actual root problem is because you're not sleeping at night. That's why you're getting, getting overweight. And the reason you're not sleeping at night is because you're worried about your paycheck. It's not going to cover your expenses this month. And so if you actually dial it back, you're spending money on something like makeup to cover up a short, a long term problem with a short term solution, which the actual root of the problem is you're not sleeping. It's causing you to gain weight. You're not sleeping because you're stressed out about money. And so when we talk about these things, I'm going to sprinkle these things throughout some of them. I the way I think about this, why it's so important, because it's very easy just to be like, oh, forget depreciation appreciation, like assets like, I don't want to think about. It's so difficult and hard. No, what's harder is living in a constant state of fear about money when it's actually not very complicated. Getting rich is extremely simple. It's not easy, but it's extremely simple. You don't need to be a mathematician. And I'm going to show you today the math behind actually building real good wealth in a regular job, making 15, 20 bucks an hour. How to do that? It is simple, but it is not easy. You will make sacrifices in order to make that simplicity of building wealth happen. Okay, let's keep going. A couple other stats I wanted to share. The average American has a negative net worth. The median, the 50th percentile. The middle American is negative net worth, which means you take all their assets that are valuable, you know, cars, houses, whatever, and then all their liabilities, all their debts, their credit card debt, what they owe on the house, what they owe on that car. And you take assets minus your liabilities, that's what equals your net worth. The average American has a negative net worth. So if you're talking to me, right, and you're like, man, I don't have any debt, but I literally have 200 in the bank, you're literally ahead of more than 50% of Americans when it comes to wealth, creating that wealth for your family. So don't beat yourself up. If you don't have a lot of money saved up, you can just get out of debt. You're ahead of most Americans, right? Another thing that. Another stat. Once you realize if you had. If you, if you earned minimum wage for the rest of your life, if you. For the entire career, career, let's say you're 20 years old and you're gonna work till you're 65, 70 years old. If you made minimum wage without any raises for the next. For the rest of your career, you would make over a million dollars, over a million dollars in revenue, in income over the next several decades of working at minimum wage without any price increases, without any wage increases, right? And if you look over the course of time, minimum wage has increased every few years. So that's going to probably happen. But even if it didn't, even if you just literally took minimum wage right now and it's worked for the next 40, 50 years, you'd become a millionaire in terms of the amount of revenue, the amount of income you would have. And so the average American, over the course of their career, is going to make $3 million in income. The average American over the course of their career is going to make $3 million.

Now, how that person spends that money is going to determine whether or not they're wealthy when they're 60, 70, 80 years old. And if you think that you only need to save enough money to retire at 65 or 70, you probably wake up to the fact that we're going to live longer because of medicine, we're going to live longer because of advances in the medical field. And so you're probably going to live to 90 or 100. So the fact that you're going to only plan for 10, 15, 20 years of retirement without making income is pretty faulty. So I actually usually kind of like think about working till 70 or 75, because if you don't, they're literally, you might run out of money. And the last thing you want to be doing is saving up enough money to retire and betting on yourself dying at a certain age. You want to make sure that you have enough money set aside in retirement to where you're able to live on that in perpetuity based upon the returns coming in from your investments. Right. That's a longer topic. We'll talk about maybe another time. But I want you to just understand that a million dollars is created over the course of a career at minimum wage without any increases in pay over the course of that entire career. Okay?

So there's kind of five different steps that I look at that I would encourage someone, again, entry level, you just got started making 10, 15, $20 an hour. This is what I'd recommend. First step is plan. Do the math. We're going to do it today. We're going to do the math on becoming rich, we're going to do the math on getting wealthy, and then make a plan around it. So the step one, step number one is plan. You've got to actually do the math for yourself. How much money am I going to make? How much money do I need to make? When am I going to retire? How many years is that going to be? What do you need to make to live on that? All those numbers need to be done planning. Okay? So to save, all right, you really create at least an emergency savings account, at least 1,000 to $5,000. This is going to be for unforeseen costs, like a flat tire, your car breaks down, you do lose your job, something happens to your house, whatever it might be, you need an emergency fund because the last thing you want to do is go into debt on credit cards at 18, 20% interest on an expense that.

As much as we want to say it's unforeseen, guess what? Unforeseen expenses happen all the time. So we should just plan on having them, right? We should just plan on our car breaking down. We should just plan on, you know, the daycare realizing that they want to double prices on your kids, whatever it might be. You got to plan for these, and these are going to happen. So have 1,000 to $5,000. That. That's like the step two, right? Step one is plan. Next, you got to create some sort of safety net, especially if you have family and kids and dependents, that number is going to be. Need to be higher because you don't want them to go hungry, stay up. Bottom line, like, we're just talking, you know, real life here. Step three is you got to increase your earning potential. All right? This goes back to investing in yourself, investing your skills. You've got to make more money right now, unfortunately, people will jump to step number three without step number one and two. And so what they'll get, what they'll do is they'll focus on getting rich quickly, getting much money quickly because they forgot to make a plan and then save. And so they start trying to focus on making more money. When that is like the third step after creating a plan, after saving money, cutting out expenses, that's all step two, cutting out expenses. Getting down to being very frugal. Step three is then focusing on increasing your earning potential, making more money. And we're going to talk today a little bit about how to get a promotion, how to get a raise, and how to make more money at your current job or finding another job. Step four is pay off bad debt. That's going to be things like credit cards, student loans. Anything that accrues debt accrues interest at a really high rate, especially credit cards. Like this is the worst thing. You're literally paying 18, 20% per year. Knock those out, you got to pay that off. That's step four. Now realize a lot of people say pay your debt off first. It's literally step four. I want you to increase your earning potential before you even start paying off your debt. Because if you can do number three and increase your earning potential and double how much you're able to make every year, because the skills that you've invested in yourself, you'll be able to pay off that debt much, much, much faster. All right, so instead of taking 30 years to pay off your student loan debt, why not focus on getting a, a higher paying job, increasing your skill set, getting a side hustle, doing something. So if you increase number three, your earning potential, you'll knock out debt way faster. Right? Step four is pay off the debt. Now, I don't mean your mortgage and your house. That's long term. It's low interest rate. In my opinion, anything less than 5%, 6% interest is okay. If it's long term, it's fixed debt like a mortgage and a house, don't worry about paying that off. But if it's variable interest rate goes up and down based upon the economy, that's the stuff you got to pay off right away. That's going to be your credit card, it's going to be your student loans, potentially could be your car, whatever type of debt that is, high interest, you want to pay that off. Step number five is investing. Okay, again, people jump to number five. They start investing in Robinhood or whatever like this when they literally have not done the first four steps. So do These in sequence, in my opinion, five. Step number five is investing. And really what I want to talk about investing when I talk about that, it's. It is investing in appreciating assets. Putting your money, your income instead of into a savings account, which is better than spending it, but instead of doing that is putting in something that actually earns you money. Investing and getting a return on that money. Okay, now when I talk about investing, I'm going to mostly talk about today a passive form of investing. And that is in the index funds. Now don't be.

Scared by that, okay? Index funds are not complicated. But I'm not going to talk today about other ways to invest your money, which is like you could invest money in real estate, you could buy a house, you could rent out one of the rooms in your house.

Investment, you could spend money on a business, you start a side hustle, that's all forms of investment. But today I'm going to really focus on a passive way of investing which is basically you put your money there and you forget about it. You don't have to worry about it, you don't have to work on it, you have to improve it, you have to buy more stuff to make it better a business. It's simply passive. It just does it without you having to think about it. And that's going to be index funds. What an index fund is, is simply a conglomeration, a whole bunch of different businesses in the stock market. It's an index, it's a broad based, a whole bunch of different companies. You're not going to go choose certain specific socks. You're not going to choose which ones you think are going to 10x in the next couple years. You're just simply going to get an index fund. Now if you're really good at picking stocks and you really get looking at profit and loss statements and balance sheets of these companies, maybe you can go outperform the market by choosing individual stocks. But today I'm talking about passive investments, which is you are simply going to invest in a broad based grouping, a basket of different companies that over time, for the past decades has gone up about 8 to 10% every single year. The S&P 500 is the most common. It's basically 500 companies. Some of the biggest companies in America that have been around for years are profitable and they're not going to go out of business tomorrow. Okay? Over the, over the decades, 8 to 10% return has come from that. Which means if I put, if I put $100 in, I can expect on average, over the course of 10, 15 years to make up 10 to $15 from that original principal and original investment. 10, about 8 to 10% every single year. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about when I talk about investing right now. Index funds, there's other types of indexes. And you can talk to someone, watch YouTube videos about different types of index funds. There's ones that are created by Vanguard. Vanguard is a company that will take a very, very, very small fee. He's like 0.03% from your investment in order to put money in all these different companies. So you don't have to worry about, you don't have to manage it, trade stocks, nothing like that. You can set up on automatic into Robinhood or we, you know, multitude of other apps that you can just automatically, every single week put money in there and it goes directly into index fund. For example, Vanguard has index funds with thousands of companies in them based on the entire world. Vt, for example, is the Vanguard Total World Index Fund. It's literally the entire world. I think there's like six or seven thousand companies in it. It's like the entire stock market. That's a great way to invest in an index fund without having to think about which company you're going to choose and which ones are doing good and which one has good news. How's the. Just passively keep putting money in there. Something over the course of time will grow on average 8 to 10%. Okay. All right. Next thing I want to talk about is how to get a promotion. I made a video on this on YouTube. I'll try to link in the bottom in the description a little more detail. But at the end of the day, to get a promotion and make more money, you want to become where you are investing in yourself and you're getting more skills. You want to get up to the point where you have leverage against your employer in order to be able to have you produce more value than what they pay you. If you're able to make that, that's when you become a form of leverage. You have the ability to ask for more money. And if they say no because they can't afford it because the business is struggling because they simply don't have the money, then you go to another job. If that's what the market is willing to pay you for, the skills that you have, they're not gonna, the market is not going to pay you more because you've been at some place for five years. They're not what they're going to pay you for is for the skills that you have. And that's why I think investing in yourself is the number one thing that you should be investing in. It's amazing to me how people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on food and clothes and making themselves look good or whatever it might be. Gym membership, computer, an iPhone. Spend a thousand dollars on an iPhone for some reason can't spend $100 on online course. Improving your skills is going to lead to a massive return on that money over the course of time. I can spend $100 on a course online to learn a skill like Photoshop or something like that. Whatever skill I'm trying to learn, learn about accounting $100 online. If that can give me a 10 cent raise over the course of my career, I will make thousands of dollars based on $100 investment. So investing in yourself and getting those skills is the number one way to build wealth. Because you are your number one asset and when you do that, you're building value in that asset. An employer will have to pay you more if they want to keep you because your market rate, what you're worth to the market becomes more and more and more. Now if you get ahead of yourself and you expect too much money because you think the value of what you're worth is so much greater, you might end up losing your job. If you just like, I'm going to leave, well, you might leave and realize that the market rate for what you're doing is not actually what you think it is. And so the number one way to make more money at the current place that you're working without having to go find another job or leave or whatever it is, is simply to make sure that the employer has to depend on you to get things done. You do not just want to be another cog in the machine. You want to show up early. You want to be able to do things that provide value in excess of what you're paid. The stupidest thing that will keep you poor, saying that is not my job. Because if it's not your job, that means that you're adding excess value in addition to what you're being paid, which then gives you leverage because you're producing more value than what you're being paid. Therefore you're going to be the one that gets more money when money comes along. Now, in some businesses, money will not come along. The business is struggling, it's not growing, there's not, there's no success in future for you in the company, then you're going to need to Leave. But in a business that's growing and there's going to be opportunity to grow into, guess who the employer is going to look to when they need to promote someone, when they want to give raises, when they're looking for a management position, they're going to look for the person that has the highest delta, the highest difference between what they're getting paid and what they're performing and bringing to the company in terms of value. And that's why you'll get more money, that's why you'll get promoted. The person that shows up early was doing more than what was expected of them. They'll get promoted. And so the number one way to improve your, the number three thing, which is earning potential is at your current job without going to find another job. Like, you're like, man, it stresses me out. Okay, great. Don't do it. Produce more value right now to your current job. And if they don't reciprocate, they don't recognize that value. In a few years, you'll have gained so much skills and knowledge, you'll be able to get a better job someplace else. Ideally, you're working for a company at Augusta Lawn Care that is growing, wants to grow, has ambitions to get more locations or grow in size, more employees, and that will lead to more opportunity for you. And when the opportunity arise, it's going to go to the person that was doing more than what their job was requiring. It's going to go to the person that was watching videos online, training themselves, listening to audio programs and improving themselves to the point when the opportunity arises, which might take a couple of years. You've got to be patient. But when that opportunity rise, it will go to the person that has been getting ready for years and has been improving and investing time, energy, money into the asset of themselves and improving their skills and abilities.

Wealth is a ratio. It's not a dollar per hour. A lot of people, well, think about money in terms of if I made X amount per hour, if I made X amount per year, I would be wealthy, I would be rich. I would feel great. That's like where I would feel like I'm making, I'm making enough money. And what's interesting is wealth is not a dollar amount. It's not a number, it's not an amount per hour that you're going to feel comfortable with or feel like you can somehow survive with your family. Wealth is a ratio, and that ratio is income divided by expenses. And if that number is greater than 1, it basically means that your income is greater than your expenses, which means ultimately your net worth is going up. It means that your wealth is being built. Wealth is a ratio. Now, if that number is negative, which means your expenses are greater than your income, it does not matter how much money you plug into this equation, you are losing wealth. That is why there are millionaires, people making millions of dollars every year that are broke. People make millions of dollars every single year. You hear about on tabloids and athletes and actors that go broke is because the ratio of income divided by expenses was negative. And so they were making all this money, all this income, all this revenue, $6 million in income. But if their expenses were 7 million, they're poor. They're a million dollars in the hole. And so it doesn't matter about the numbers. It's a ratio. So if you're making 20, $30,000 a year, but you divide that by your expenses, and those are $15,000 a year, guess what? You have positive number. You are building wealth. And if you deploy that extra difference, the difference between your income and your expenses towards the right things in stage number five, which is investing that money will compound over time and start really generating some great wealth. The larger that number can be, the difference, the delta, the ratio between income divided by expenses, the higher you get that number, the better. So it doesn't matter what the numbers are, it matters what the ratio is. Because there are people that if I. If they're making $100,000 today and they got four, you know, next year they're making $400,000. Guess what? They just spend all $400,000. They just improve their lifestyle, get a bigger house, get a couple extra cars, move to a new neighborhood, spend more money on their country club, and they just spend all 400,000. Do thousand. Wealth is a ratio. It is not a dollar amount. So stop thinking like, oh, if I just get this promotion, I'll make a certain amount of dollars. It doesn't matter. It's a ratio. That's why you see, you've also seen articles of people that make 20, $30 an hour. They're a UPS driver, they're a delivery driver, whatever it is, and they retire with millions of dollars. Why? Because they figured out that if their income is less than their expenses, this is a ratio. This is not a numbers game. And if over the course of time they continue to have that wealth ratio in check, they will become wealthy, they will make a lot of money, be able to save a lot and invest a lot of money.

It's really important in my mind. To be frugal and stage number two is safe. And that's like, get rid of expenses, cut out all the waste, Cut out all the stuff that's sapping all the income out of your business or, sorry, out of your personal expenses. When I talk about businesses, the reason I, I would mess up, it's the same stuff. Personal, personal finances and business is like the same thing. You know, in business we talk about income and sales. Well, like, your wages are your income. You are the business. You know, we talk about a business, we think about, you know, what's your expenses? What's your, how much are you spending on all the, you know, all these other costs? Well, the same things for you. You are a business. You have expenses. You've got to pay for your house, for your rent, for utilities, for food, etc. When we talk about saving, we've got to cut out all the waste. All the stuff that you have like five subscriptions. You do not need five subscriptions, like Netflix, hbo, I got Hulu, I got Roku. Like, you don't need all of those. So you can start looking at your expenses and say, where can I cut out all of the things that are sapping my wealth ratio again? Income divided by expenses. What's in that expense ratio? What's in the expense column that can just wipe out? What can it be as frugal as all get out? I'm going to run the math here in just a moment on how much this impacts you over time when it comes to cutting out wasteful spending.

I want you to ask, what is your vice? Right? What is your vice? What's the thing that you spend money on that you know is sapping that wealth ratio that you have? You know, that guilty pleasure, the thing that you do all the time? Maybe it's like, well, every single week I have to spend a hundred dollars on my massage. Every single week I've got to go out to this fancy restaurant and spend 200 and get alcohol and all the rest of it. Like, there are people that spend more money on alcohol and cigarettes than they do on improving the asset themselves their whole life. It's crazy. And so when, when we start looking at your expenses, you start looking at your income. What is your guilty pleasure? What's the thing that you do? Because, like, hey, like, that's just my vice. Like, I spend, I know I spend over. I spend way too much on Amazon. I spend way too much on buying clothes. Whatever it is, you've got to figure out what that is because that is probably the thing that literally holding you back from getting ahead in life financially, it's usually one or two things in someone's a personal budget that I can look at and say, that's the thing. Eating out. Some people literally spend thousands of dollars eating out every month. Look, if you just split that money and put it towards savings or investing, you literally become a millionaire. But people can't disassociate the short term from the long term. So in the short term, like, well, it's only 50 bucks. Like, it's only $50 to go out and grab a meal and get some drinks and things like that this evening. Yeah, you're right. But if you do that over the course of five times in a week, and then you do that 30 times over course a month and 300 times over course a year, you start doing the math. And that was stage one, is you've got to do the math on your finances. So we're going to do some of the math in just a few minutes. Before we talk about that, some people say, well, let's talk about quality of life, because I enjoy spending money on alcohol or I enjoy buying clothes on Amazon. That's something I love to do. And so in our culture, we've somehow made it fine that if our vice is improving our quality of life, quote, unquote, that it's okay to spend money like, treat yourself. You know, just treat yourself. But you've got to realize that the quality of life that you're trying to aspire to is probably a band aid for the insecurities that are being caused by you not having the money because you. And the reason you don't have the money is because you're spending on the vice.

So I'm going out to eat. Like, I love. I love it. Going out to eat and just kind of getting wasted on the weekend. I like going to the club, whatever it is. You're going to drop a couple hundred bucks every single weekend. And the reason you do that is what makes me feel better. Well, the reason it makes you feel better is because you left a job that you hate, you worked all weekend on. And the reason you hate that job is because you're not investing yourself to get more money at that job. And you're barely scraping by. You're struggling to pay rent. And so it's not to say that someone in that situation is a bad person. It's a matter of the fact that they probably just haven't been educated. They haven't been told the numbers and the math of what that is causing that $200 on the weekend they're spending at the club, what that's doing to their long term financial success. And because of the financial stress that they're having in their life, it's causing them to stay at a job that they really hate and they'll be overworked. And the reason they're going to club is just a band aid to the fact that they need to make more money. If you don't think money solves any problems, there's one. So let's go ahead and go move on. I want to talk a little bit about one last thing, frugality, in this same vein of cutting out things that you don't need. Nick Reed was one of the employees that worked at our local Bellingham shop for a couple years. He joined, he was 19 years old, just mowing lawns. He had previously been a ski lifty at a ski lodge locally. And you know where they just do the ski chair, what's it called, the chairlifts. He was operating those and doing ski instructors and things like that. And Keen went 19 years old. He started off making 18 bucks an hour as our base pay. We have P4P pay for performance, obviously, so he would make more. But what he determined is he started listening to audible programs and learn about money and business and how to create wealth and all those different things we talked about. He started investing in himself and that changed his mindset about money and what he could do. And he didn't come from a family money, his family that had money or his family had been broken and he on his own a lot. And so what he ended up doing is for two years he stayed and lived in his van. And he would come early under the shop and, you know, dry out his clothes during the day and he'd cook in his, in his van. And he lived in his van for two years. Why? Because he was trying to cut every single possible expense so you could save money. And two years later, he became a franchisee or an owner at Augusta Lawn Care. For everyone watching this, that's what you can do as being part of Augusta Lawn Care. And I'm going to talk about upper mobility and trying to get to the next stage of your career throughout this whole video. And we built that into Augusta Lawn Care. And that is if you get the skills, if you invest in yourself enough, if you come to work every single day and create that discrepancy between value and what you're actually getting paid, there is upward mobility. There is an option to actually get ahead, whether that becoming a manager, an estimator, a project manager, or potentially, like Nick did, become an owner, actually own his own business. So now fast forward a couple more years because everyone, everyone, I say everyone's able to do that. That's called the 3F program, franchise fee forgiveness. So you're able to get started. There's no initial fee, which is usually $20,000, to join as an owner. You get all the training necessary to start your own business, and you don't have to pay that just by working at any location of Augusta Lawn Care for two years. So that's what he did. He lived in his van for two years, worked his brains out, put every single penny aside. And I don't think he'd mind me saying he had about 40 or $50,000 saved up after two years of just living on absolutely as little as he possibly can. He wouldn't spend money on anything. He wouldn't want to spend money on washing his clothes. Like the guy was over the top. Now, if you have family, if you have dependents, you're not gonna do that. You're not gonna be able to live in a van. You're not gonna cut, you know, save 90, 80, 90% of your income to be able to go towards some future endeavor investing. Right? That's ultimately what it is, invested in a business. Right? And so.

The bottom line, though, is someone like Nick sacrificed in the short term for what he wanted in the long term. And if you're listening to this, you're like, man, I don't have any money. And I just don't believe I can ever become wealthy. And maybe being rich or making money has never been something you talked about, your family never talked about, and yet you think it's unobtainable. I want you to realize that it's not so much what you're going to add, how much more money you're going to make. Everyone gets fixated on that. It's how much you can cut out of frivolous spending, unnecessary spending, and improve that ratio of income versus expenses. If you do that, you create enough discrepancy, you'll build wealth. You can absolutely do it. It's just going to take time, and you're not going to do it overnight. Anyone that tells you you can make money really fast is trying to sell you something. Money over time spent in the right places, invested in the right appreciating asset will, over the course of decades, make you wealthy. Anyone that says it's going down a year or two or three is trying to sell you something. Okay, so let's run the math, right? We've already been almost 50 minutes. I'm sorry. Let's jump into. Let me share this screen. We're going to do a retirement calculator. You can find all sorts of these ones from Dave Ramsey. Let's run some math. Okay, first one.

Is. Let's just run kind of the, you know, if you. How much money do you retire? What can we do here? Okay, so let's just say right now you're 20 years old, okay? And you say, I'm gonna, you know, I plan to work till I'm like, 75. Okay, let's just say 75 because, you know, you're probably gonna work live till you're 95. You don't wanna spend 30, 40 years in retirement. That's just boring. You're gonna do something. So let's just say 75 is when you're gonna retire. Okay? How much do you currently have investments? Let's just say you're at zero right now. Like, you have no money. You don't have a 401k or IRA. That stuff is just absolute gibberish and Japanese to you. Great, you're at zero. How much will you contribute monthly? All right, let's just say that we're going to put 400 in here, which is $100 per week. That's the goal. Now, if you're on P4P, this is what my recommendation would be. If you're out in the field working right now, and you make P4P, which everyone in Augusta Lawn Care should be on P4P. If you're not, talk to your owner and give them a spanking and tell them, talk to me. But if you're on P4P, this is what I would recommend doing. If you're trying to build wealth, look at. Try to make sure that your. Your base pay per hour is something you can live on. Make sure your budget, make sure expenses are covered by that pay. If you're making $15 an hour and you work 40 hours a week, that's $600 per week that you need to get your budget down to to live off of that hourly wage. And what I would recommend is take all of your performance dollars, all your P4P that's above base pay, and try to invest that. Okay, so now you can work the math backwards. Like, well, if I'm going to invest a hundred dollars a week, that means I need to earn $700 on P4P. You can run all this math backwards, right? Back to how much I need to. How many lawns I need to mow today. You can run the math backwards. And so let's just say you invest a hundred dollars per week. That's $400 per month. Let's add this back in here. Okay? $4 per month. And now we're going to invest in index fund, the S&P 500. It says 10 to 12%. Let's just do 10%. All right, so 10% return on an index fund over the course of your working years. Let's run the math here. Check this out. If someone watching this video right now is 20 years old and you're going to work for like 55 years, which is just old. You know what? Let's get soft. Let's do 65. All right? We're going to retire at 65. Check this out.

If I'm 20 right now, I'm planning to retire at the age of 65. I have zero money right now. My net worth is absolutely nothing. But I'm able to contribute $100 per week, just $400 per month. And I get 10% return over the course of time because I invest in an index fund. When I retire at 65, I'm going to have $4.2 million. $4.2 million.

By investing 100 bucks a week. And hopefully that would just add a P4P. Right? So you can think about P4P as. Can I make enough on base pay? I actually take that back. Can I take what I earn on base pay and make sure that my budget fits that amount? Because this is the problem. Everyone talks about making more money, but you know what happens when people get raises? You know what they do, right? They go buy another car. They increase their standard of living. And by doing that, they make that ratio never go up for them. Because as their income goes up, they just move their expenses up. They move to a better neighborhood, put their kids in nice schools, get some nicer clothes, go out to eat an extra time a week, and if you do that, you're simply moving up your expense ratio according to your income. That's why people make more and more money and just keep spending more and more money. They'll never become wealthy. That's why making more money is not the solution to becoming wealthy. It's spending less money. So that ratio becomes greater and greater income divided by expenses. All right, $4.2 million. If you just invested $100 per week. This is incredible. Again, this is not flashy. Spending a hundred Dollars per week. After a year, you're gonna have a whopping $5,000, and you're gonna feel like, this is such a waste of time. I could spend that $5,000 in my car. I could get a nicer apartment. Like, this is $5,000. No, this is over the course of 45 years. Patience is required to build wealth. Money is incredible, has an incredible compounding effect if you invest in the right places. And again, we're assuming here that we're investing in an index fund that does 10% of annual return. Okay? Now, if you manipulate these numbers, like, maybe it's a skinny. The stock market is horrible. Well, you still walking with $2.1 million, right? Maybe it crushes. It does 12%. Look at that. $8.5 million generated in the course of a career by investing $100 per week. Incredible. Now, this is the part I really want to dig into, so let's just take this out. Let's say that you're like, hey, I am going to. You know, right now I'm thinking about buying something. I'm thinking about buying some wheels on my truck and getting a lift kit on it, right? Let's say it's going to cost you like, I don't know, $1500. Okay? $1500 is what's going to cost you today, today's dollars to buy these nice brand new rims. Make me feel better, give me a little ego boost. When I drive into work every day, everyone's gonna look at me and admire my truck. Great. Fifteen hundred dollars. All right, so that's the present value. Okay? There's this thing called the future value of money, and it's what I want to calculate here. What is this actually worth to you down the road? So let's just say you're 20 years old. You're going to retire at 65, 45 years from now. Let's assume that our, you know, rate of return that we're assuming in the stock market would be like 10% on that index fund. Let's go ahead and calculate that. Think about this. Look at this. Check this out. If I spend $1500 today instead of investing that when I retire, that $1500 would have become 109, almost $110,000. So when you start thinking about it like this, you start looking at every single dollar you spend the day as. Not a dollar for this or $10 for a sub sandwich or that, $1,500 for that, the tires and a lift kit. That $1500 literally is $110,000. If you would have just invested that instead of spending it. That's why I say it's not about how much money you make, it's how much you save. It's how much we, how much you can reduce of your of your expenses. Because that's the part that otherwise can go into investments that over the course of time compound and you can absolutely generate wealth. You don't need a lot of money. This is a fifteen hundred dollar purchase. A fifteen hundred dollar purchase today. If I just would invest that and Forget about such 45 years, putting in the stock market index fund averaging 10% per year is going to do $110,000 when I retire.

Okay, let's look at this one. So you say, you know what, I can do better? Let's check this out. You say, you know What, I'm not 20, I'm 30 years old. Okay, great. And I don't have any investments, I don't have anything. I'm gonna have to work a little bit longer because I'm kind of behind. I'm already 30, don't have any investments, I don't have any net worth whatsoever. But you know what, I'm gonna go, I'm going to watch some videos on how to get better at my job, make more money on P4P and instead of doing $100 per week, I'm actually going to try to do $200 per week. That's $800 a month. Okay. And let's just say this is 10% again, look at the math. Literally if you're able to contribute. Sorry, that's not per week. 800 is per month. There we go. So $800 per month would assume $200 per week. Look at the amount of $5 million. If someone was able to do that, that's not easy to stack away $800 per month. But the question is, can you generate $800 more in your job? Because you go invest in skills, you go invest in making yourself more efficient on P4P to where you can put that money aside. That's why we have P4P. So if someone wants to invest and work on themselves and get more skilled and become more efficient, become better at their job, they're able to do this. $800 a month is not any small sum amount of money. I know that. But someone at the age of 30 considering themselves behind on being able to save and invest, literally can generate $5 million by the time they are retiring if they just put that money aside. Now this is what's really more interesting because a lot of people are like, well, I can't do $800. Okay, you can't. I agree. Right now you're barely scraping by. Perhaps this is what you should be thinking about. What can I cut out? Perhaps right now your monthly payment, your monthly car payment is $400 a month. And maybe right now your rent is $1,500 per month for your, for your house. Housing and vehicles are some of the biggest expenses that we have. Now, let's just say we're 20 years old, we're going to retire, we're 70, we have no money right now. But my, instead of what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend this entire summer trying to buy a car. I'm going to downsize my car because instead of spending $400 a month on a brand new car that I'm leasing, I'm going to go spend five or six thousand dollars on a cheap car that will still get me from point A to point B to be reliable, cheap. Probably save me less on gas, less on insurance. But just take the payment per month. All right, $400. Let's wipe that out. Okay, so I'm saving that extra $400 per month instead of my car payment. And I'm not going to go spend it something stupid that's depreciating. I'm going to go spend on something that's appreciating an asset that is the stock market index funds again, 8 to 10% over the course of years. So it's going to save $400 per month for that payment that we're going to throw towards investments. Great. Now what we're going to do is we're instead of living in that $1,500 per month apartment, we're going to go try to find something for 1100. Saving an extra $400, you say, well, I can't do that. I have family, I have a couple kids. Okay, great. Is there any way you could potentially get someone to take one of the rooms and rent it out for you from you for $400? You have to check your rental agreement, see if you're allowed to do subleasing. But if you're able to do that, $400 per month again is the exact same as long as you put that money towards the investment. So we save $400 from downsizing our car, we saved $400 from downsizing our housing, our rental, or potentially getting someone else. You know, maybe you have to go and you have to, you know, instead of getting your own apartment, your own two bedroom apartment, you're living by yourself. Maybe you get a roommate to live in the other room, maybe go down to a one bedroom, maybe go to a studio. Okay, it the reason, like some of you here, let me just take this off one second. The reason.

That I, I still to this day live way below my means because I'm trying to keep that ratio what we talked about. I live in a closet, right? I sleep on a six by six closet with a mattress, single mattress on the floor, no box spring. And I've done that for four, almost five years now. It's not because a Mother Teresa and I'm trying to give money away to people, it's because I want to become rich. And you're going to have to sacrifice what otherwise could have been a nice condo, a nice apartment, buy my own house. But I haven't done that because I'm interested in building wealth, not in looking wealthy. You have to realize, you have to ask yourself, do you want to be rich or do you want to look rich in front of other people? That is what will keep most people from building wealth is the fact that they want to look rich instead of be rich. They want to have the fancy car, they want to have the fancy house. Instead of actually building wealth, instead of actually taking this, having self confidence and self worth enough to realize that what's in their bank account is what determines their wealth. That ratio we've talked about, the wealth ratio is what determines their, their wealth. Not what people think about you because you're driving a new car. What people think about you because what neighborhood you live in, what kind of clothes that you have, that's what will make people think you're rich, but it will not make you rich. You have to ask yourself the question and if you're really honest with yourself, if you're really honest with yourself, some of you actually will have to agree with your. We ask of the question that you actually want to look rich more than you want to be rich. And if that is the truest of answers for you, you have to break that mentality. You have to realize that your self worth and your net worth is not wrapped up in what other people think about you. It's a mindset.

So let's move on. We've run the math, we've shown the fact that here in this example, if we were able to cut $400 out of our by getting a clunker car, getting a cheap car, downsizing our housing A little bit. That's going to save us $800 per month. And we invested that again. Look at the math. $14 million.

That's nuts. That's math. And that's why step number one of building wealth in my mind is planning and running the numbers. And you might say, well, like, look, I'm. I'm older. Like, I'm 45, and I don't have that time for it to compound. Okay, let's run the numbers. You're still a millionaire. You have over a million dollars by the time you retire. If you were able to do those two things, downsize your car and downsize your house. Those are not easy things to do. But you've got to realize you just sacrifice, or you're going to one day wake up when you're 70 and regret that you did not make that sacrifice. There's one thing I commonly ask myself. Sacrifice or regret. You choose. Every single day you make a decision, and you choose whether you're going to sacrifice today or one day in the future, regret that you did not make that sacrifice. If you're not willing today to downsize the car or downsize the house and save that money and put that towards an investment, which is not easy, it's not fun, which is not glamorous, which no one will pat you on the back, which no one will think that you're rich. People probably actually think you're poor. And that's fine. Because what you're going to do today is sacrifice the perception of others in exchange so that one day when you wake up at 70, you're not regretting that you have absolutely no money and you're living on Social Security. And again, Social Security is simply another form of putting your freedom and your financial.

Success in the hands of somebody else, the government. And guess what? Social Security is a broke system. It probably won't be around for what for the most. The life lifespan of most of us think it's broke. It's completely wrecked financially. So why would I depend on Social Security to be the thing that when I'm 70 years old, I get a Social Security check from the government that's completely bankrupt.

Right. Let's move on, because I'm just on page one, and we still have a whole nother page to go. Okay, let's see here. I've already talked about this a little bit, but you've got to stick with a company that has upward mobility. If that's not Augusta, you need to leave. Okay. If you're working for Augusta Lawn Care, right Now and your owner is not trying to grow, doesn't give you opportunity to learn, doesn't show you open book management, doesn't have the ambition to start a second location where you could potentially become a manager or learn more about the business, you should leave, go someplace else.

Ideally, and hopefully by being part of Augusta Nation, you at least have the ambition to be able to get ahead. Sorry, not the ambition, the opportunity to be able to get ahead by becoming an owner. But ideally you have steps prior to that in the form of maybe becoming a manager, having an audible program that you can gain those skills. Like in our local shop, we have over 400 books over the course of years that we've purchased the audible programs, literally thousands of hours worth of audio about finances, management, leadership. These are all skills that you can have literally for free that your owner paid for so you can improve your skill set and invest in the asset that is the most valuable. And that is you take advantage of that. If they're not giving you those opportunities, if there's not opportunity because the business hasn't grown for the past five years and there's no one getting promoted, you should leave now. If the business is doubling every single year in size and someone wants to start a second location for Augusta Lawn Care, they they're starting to figure out real estate investing and they're trying to grow their own wealth. That's someone you can learn from. That's someone you should stay with. You should not go get another job for 50 cents or a dollar more per hour. You should stick with that company, say, well, there's a big discrepancy between what I'm worth and what I'm getting paid. So you're going to go jump on some other company that's willing to pay you more money in the short term, but have absolutely no ladder of up ability, you have to ask yourself what is the cost of that extra paycheck? Because a lot of companies, as they get large and bloated and there's no opportunity to grow, the only way to attract talent is pay more money. You do not want to be in that company if you're at the top of that ladder, is not as high as you want to earn. If you want to make more than $50,000 a year, don't go jump on a job that's only going to top out at 45, because right now you're making 35. Stay at the $35 job, $35,000 for your job. If you look at the upper mobility inside that company and really get to a hundred thousand.

That type of short term thinking is what leads people to constantly live paycheck to paycheck. It's that short term thinking that is going to keep someone constantly raising their cost of living as they make more money.

So I'd recommend focus on the vehicle you're in, the business, you're working, the job that you have, not so much how fast you're going.

Okay, so I'm running as fast as I possibly can. I'm going, I'm on a bike. Okay, I'm on a bike. I'm going as fast as I can. Let's say 20 miles an hour, right? A Ferrari is right next to me. It's going eight miles an hour. Should I get out of the Ferrari and jump on the bike and like, oh, they're going, it's going faster. I'm going to make sure I get on this bicycle. It's going 20 miles an hour versus my eight. No, I'm going to stay in the vehicle. It has the potential to go 200 mph. Same thing when it comes to your job. Think about how fast this vehicle can go and how fast it can get me there and the potential speed that it can get to. That might mean that you're going to wait a few extra years and actually make less than what you could have by getting out of the Ferrari and making a few dollars per hour more on a different vehicle, a different business, a different job. But it isn't going to have the potential for any upward mobility in your career, Right? Stay in the Ferrari. And if you're not in a Ferrari, get out of this stinking, get off the bike.

Regardless of what job you're in right now, if you're on the bike and you're just pedaling as fast as you can, like, I gotta keep making more money in this job. Like you're on a bike. The business is never going to grow. You're never going to have any opportunity to expand your, your income potential. You never have any chance to learn new skills, challenge yourself. You're not having managers that are telling you how you can improve. You need to leave that job and you go find a Ferrari. That, and that might mean taking a pay cut, but no, that, that, that bicycle going 20 miles an hour, like, hey, I'm gonna go in this Ferrari that's idling next to me at 5 miles per hour. Like you're actually taking a short term setback for the opportunity that that Ferrari can all of a sudden take off. And now you're in that vehicle. Right? So don't get, don't get caught up in the short term. Like, oh, I'm gonna work here for six months and work here for a year and then work here for two months. And I'm just going to constantly go for another quarter here, another 50 cents here, and the 50 cents here. Realize the vehicle you're in is more important than the speed at which you're traveling. All right, let's move along. My, my laptop is dying, so it must be. I'm just taking way too long. I'm gonna plug it in and then we're going to talk about last couple things. We'll wrap it up. Okay. Kind of back to what I had talked about before, and that is about many people, actually. They don't want to be rich. They want to be perceived as rich because they want their friends, family, parents, siblings, co workers to think more of them. And they somehow think that the social status gained by being quote, unquote rich and having money is going to get them what they want in life. And so ultimately, I think that most buying decisions are actually not because it's in the best interest of our finances, not because it's best for our family, not because it's best for our community, but it's based upon what other people think of us. And if you actually realize that most of your life is spent working and if you don't enjoy your job, that's fine. I'm not really into, like, doing things because I enjoy them. You got to earn a living, you got to make, you provide for your family, make food, you know, be able to buy food. Whether or not you like your job doesn't really matter.

But the bottom line is, let's just say you don't like your job and it's a pain in the neck every single day you have to go to work. Why would I want to work.

40, 50, 60 hours a week doing something I do not like to do? Only in order to afford things that I cannot afford, to buy things that I cannot afford in order to impress people they don't really care about. That is the co workers that I go to work with, that is my boss that I don't really like. That is the in laws that I really could care less about and hate to see their face. But I'm going to make sure that when I pull up to the family gathering, I am in the Mercedes instead of the Toyota. Like, it's an incredible thought process. If you actually peel it back in terms of most of our buying Decisions are actually based upon what other people will think about that buying decision instead of what actually best for us in our personal finances and our future and our success. Buying that Gucci purse, like, what's that for? Is it because you need to carry your. Your wallet in a $1,000 purse, or is it because the perception of other people when they see that Gucci purse, what they're going to label you as? And you can disassociate your buying decisions, what other people will think about you? You'll immediately be able to improve that wealth equation because you'll immediately start to take away expenses that you're making right now simply because of what other people think. So instead of buying three or four drinks when you go out, you'll buy one because you don't care that everyone else is buying three or four. You care less. You don't need to do it because of social pressure. You're not going to have to, you know, do all the other things in life that we do to spend money trying to make us look good in front of people that we don't really care about.

It's insane. So let's move on. Debt, last couple of things here. We'll wrap it up. Let's talk about debt. This is one thing that kind of really changed my mindset, and that is most people don't even know how banks work, okay? And I did not mean that to be derogatory. I didn't know how a bank worked for a very long time. It's like, how does it work that they build all these massive buildings of beautiful banks and tellers, and I give them my money and I take it back, and.

I didn't even give them any money. It was free to bank there. All right? This is how a bank makes money. It's not in the fees, like overdraft fees and things. It's not really. Here's how they make money.

They let their money work for them the same way we talked about investing and letting money work for you. That's what they're doing. Here's how it works. You come in, you give them a thousand dollars, and you put in your savings account, and they're going to give you a whopping 0.05% in interest for keeping your money there. They're going to take that money and they're going to go lend it to somebody else, and they're going to charge that person between 5 and 20% interest to give them your money that you gave them for 0.05%. That's how they make money. And what they're going to do is they're going to sell someone a credit card, they're going to sell someone an auto loan, they're going to sell someone a real estate loan. And those loans are going to get somewhere between 5 and 20% return on the money every single year. And they're going to give you 0.05%. That's how debt works. That's how banks make money. And one of the biggest, craziest things is student debt. Like think about this for just a second. I love student debt. Think about this for just a moment, okay?

Think how crazy this is. We're going to allow.

An 18 year old that is not legally allowed to drink. We're not going to let them drink alcohol. God forbid, let them do that. But we are going to allow them to take hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncollateralized loans. Uncollateralized means they have no assets, they have absolutely no income, no house, they have nothing. But we're going to give them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Oh, and by the way, even if they declare bankruptcy down the road, that debt will still follow them like diluted. How stupid this is that we're training young people that is. It is more risky to do something like drinking, which is obviously risky if you drink and drive or whatever, but it's more risky to do that. Then you go hundreds of thousand dollars worth of debt and spend the next couple decades of your life paying that off without any education about what debt is there any indication of. Oh, if you would have spent that money and invest it or all the interest that you're going to spend over the next 20 years paying that off and we've invested it and taking account the fact that getting that piece of paper no longer really leads to a guaranteed job. When if they would have spent that four years just working on themselves like we've talked about, investing in their own self, their own asset and improving their skill set, online books, audible programs, all the rest of it. They'd probably have made a lot more money doing it that way. Finding the vehicle. They would have spent four years finding the right company, the right vehicle to get in. I guarantee you within 20 years that they would otherwise been spending on just paying off their student loans, they'd be years down the road. Right? When we go back to our Ferrari versus bicycle example, unfortunately a lot of times going the college route is the bicycle. It's like in the short term, everyone, it looks good, I'm going faster. Let's go. But they fail to realize that they just invest in the right vehicle. They're investing in themselves, gaining more skills and actually start putting money aside, investing it in the long run, they make a lot more. Anyways, all that aside, I wanted to just talk, though, about how the banks work. Because when we talk about investing and letting your money work for you, that's essentially what banks are doing. And so you got to ask yourself, do you either want to be the one that money is working for you, investing in the S&P 500, 8 to 10% year over year for decades.

Or do you want to be the person funding the bank's growth and letting your money work for them? Because money is going to work for somebody. So everyone's like, oh, you shouldn't try to make money. Guess what? Regardless of whether I have the money, the money's gonna work. Money loves to work, all right? It loves to replicate and make babies, all right? It like to work. And whoever has the possession and the control of that money, usually the one with the most information. And unfortunately, the banks have the information. They know that if they can just put money aside and lend out debt to other people, they'll make a lot more money in the long term because they have. They get the 10% return instead of the person that is the investor, the person that's actually putting the money into the bank that's making 0.05%.

I really just kind of, as a wrap up here, I really think doing the hard, boring work to make change is important. It is not glamorous to do anything we've talked about today. Downsizing your car, downsizing your house, cutting out frivolous expenses, things that you love, things that make you feel better in the short term, those are not fun. They're not easy. But doing the hard, boring work for years on end is what leads to generating wealth. If it was easy, everyone would do it. If it was easy to downsize and stack away $100 per week out of your paycheck into something as boring as the S&P 500, everyone would do it.

And that's why not. That's why most people will retire with no money and live on Social Security and live. They won't be able to travel. They won't be able to give back to their grandkids. They won't be able to create a legacy for themselves or be able to help. Help their community. They won't be able to do that. That's what I want for you. So, like, when we talk about the Audible program, when we talk about things inside of Gus that we are trying to create for upward mobility, I encourage you to take advantage of that. If your owner is trying to do open book management, they're not doing that for their own health. They're trying to show you skills. They're trying to show you investments into yourself. You the asset that can grow and expand over time. That's going to improve the value to you in the market of you to the market. You realize that it's almost really, really twisted for an owner to do open book management and teach their employees about the numbers, because we're actually giving numbers. We're giving the information required for you to make more money, and that potentially might mean you leaving. So when they're doing that, they're not doing it for their own health. They're not doing it because they want to make more money. It's because we're trying to get you to the next stage of your career. And hey, hopefully that's inside of the company. Hopefully you're able to become a manager, an estimator, et cetera. Maybe you use the 3F program, become an owner, that'd be great. But if that's not the case where you're working, you need to go get another job. You need to go find a different vehicle and. But I encourage you, while you're here, use the Audible program. Like, if you buy books yourself, those 10, $15 you're gonna spend on Audible program for eight, 10 hours. Learning from some of the best minds in the world is absolutely invaluable. You know, $50 for an online course, learning a new skill, something that makes you more valuable to the company, that's gonna be, that's gonna set you apart. That's gonna be the thing that sets you up for the promotion next year when so and so calls out sickness, like that's what's going to happen.

And to remember, you know, it comes open book management or Profit Sharing or P4P. Your owner, your manager, they might not have all the answers, right? I'm making this as the founder of Augusta. But your owners, they're learning, too. Some of the stuff I talked about today for the owners is going to be new information. They're still trying to build their own career, their own wealth, trying to figure things out themselves. So they're not going to. Don't expect them to know everything, but realize that we're all in this journey together trying to advance, educate, learn and grow. The day you stop learning is the day you start dying. Whether it be in business, whether it be in your physical body, whether it be in your life. And the last thing we want to do at Augusta Lawn here in Augusta Nation is to stop learning. It starts with myself, all the way down to someone who just started yesterday mowing grass. I every single day am trying to learn and grow and become better. I expect that from the people that work here at Command center, the tour that I showed you. I expect the owners of Augusta Nation to do the same and expect every single employee to have the desire and the hunger to get ahead. That alone, that type of culture is the thing that will make the company great. And by making the company great, I do not mean it makes more money or anything like that. It's a matter of do the result. What we produce in the form of people doesn't get them the head because we all know jobs that are dead end or that you just feel sapped up the job takes from you. We've got to focus on how do we create a culture. When people come, they feel like something was added to them. Not just a paycheck, but skills and information and education that's going to set them up for success down the road.

Money follows attention. Wrap it up here. Money follows attention. The reason we're talking about this, the reason I'm so, so want to spend this time to get you guys this video. Money follows attention. And for most of us, we have our attention the wrong stuff, right? We spend so much of our time scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, what's going on in sports or the news or politics. And guess what? Money follows attention. So if you're watching every single movie show, guess what you're going to spend money on HBO and Netflix and a nicer TV and a better audio system, et cetera. Money follows attention. And you focus your attention on your personal finances and your budget and step one, which is planning, you actually focus and are attentive to it. Money will follow. Money follows attention. If you look through every single fashion magazine, guess what? If I saw that, that behavior, your attention is on it. That's where money will go. You will spend more money on clothes and on all accessories and all the rest of it. So if you're going to start to actually start wanting to change your wealth trajectory, wanting to change how much money you make, you're going to have to put your attention on it. And that might mean you don't enjoy talking about money, you don't enjoy making a budget, you don't enjoy running these calculators and running the math that we did today, but money will follow that attention. Okay.

Last thing. No one is coming to save you. All right? Don't get in this mindset. Unfortunately, somewhat born out of 2020, when the government swoop in and gave us all a bunch of money to stay home, that someone else is going to come save you. Guess what? A politician, a president, is not going to come save you and make you financially independent. All the promises of being middle class and union work and all the rest of it is a bunch of garbage. Do not put your financial security in the finances of your, your family and your future in the hands of any other person. That includes your boss. Because if you're getting overpaid right now for a job that you don't actually have the skills for, you are putting your financial future in the hands of another person as your boss because they fire you now, you're going to have to take a pay cut. So what you should be doing, take ownership of your pay, take ownership of your salary, take ownership of what you're able to produce by improving your skills. Because the thing that that boss, the thing that that politician cannot take away from you is the skills that you have, is the knowledge that you have, is the information that you have, is the education from an audible program, from an accounting course, from a course you took online about Photoshop. Those are the things that no one can take away from you. This type of education about finances, how banks work and how debt works and no one can take that away from you. And I think that's the type of thing we should be focused on. You've got to figure this out. One of those things, whether you like it or not, you got to figure it out. And don't rely on a politician or family member or a boss, someone else to dictate where you go financially. So it leads to a lot of poverty, what leads to a lot of broken promises, broken families, people that are unhappy, discouraged, feel like victim mentality because they're always depending on someone else. It means that their entire future is wrapped up in the decision making of someone else. A politician that looks at them correctly, changes their tax rate, gives them a stimulus, like, don't do that. Maybe you do get some money, maybe you get a stimulus. Check whatever it is, great. But don't wrap up all of your emotions in someone else's determination of whether or not you're going to be successful or make more money. Take ownership of your finances, put attention on your finances and money will follow. So hope that was helpful. Talk to your owners at Augusta Nation. They can help you more. And I appreciate all of you, appreciate all your hard work. And I make videos like this because I do care. I want you to get ahead. Thanks so much. And maybe one day, I like, if you like this, talk to your owner, don't talk to me. And maybe I'll do one of these every year or two or six months or something like that. So, anyways, take care, guys.